Web trends: content and readers

by Fred Showker

I'm still pursuing the quest to keep up with trends in the publishing and internet world. Following my last entry, the big trends are no-brainers -- and you know about those. However, digging around I'm continually digging up articles that I feel are important enough to pass along to DTG readers. If you have web presence, or work for a company in the web, or have clients on the web, I believe these articles will be of real value. As always, when you run across good references, please pass them along!

The future of content navigation

As I've always stressed in graphic design, the web interface is pivotal. A good one will allow you to rope in your readers / viewers, and make them loyal to your brand, your contents. Pouring money and resources into an editorial effort, striving to get the best out of your team, buying the best contributions, pictures, multimedia features available -- All of this is pointless without an effective interface. With this in mind, let's see what's lies ahead of us in the interface world. continue reading :: Frederic Filloux - mondaynote.com

Most online news readers use five sites or fewer

The audience for news online tends not to stick to a single site -- that much has been known for years. But a new study says that even with a vast array of digital choices, "promiscuous" news consumption goes only so far. (NYT article)
The internet is at the center of the story of how people's relationship to news is changing. Six in ten Americans (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day, and the internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.continue reading :: www.journalism.org

Remove bad press online

The easiest way to remove bad press is to "bump it out" of the first page, because research shows that 90% people do not move beyond the first page when they search for something specific. Statistics reveal that over 70 percent of the so-called "news" is likely to be defamatory and about 80 percent of your prospective business partners dig up the Internet to check out your company's profile. So how do you work towards removing bad press online? Here are a few tips. continue reading :: Reputation Management

Google Buzz organizing relevance from the noise

Yes, as the social media ramps up to a roar it's gotten impossible for any mere human to gather any real substance. It's just noise.

Yahoo! Buzz is forever trying to keep up with the din of noise -- adding new features like "Top Buzz", a widget for any publishers interested in expanding their content offerings by displaying the top articles across. Or, then there's "First Buzzed By" showing who buzzed it first -- coupled with their RSS feeds for top Buzz stories overall, as well as within specific categories. (http://buzz.yahoo.com/) But Google is still the big boy in gathering, digesting, and regurgitating information is a supposedly sain method. In February, Google wrote:

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web -- finding relevance in the noise -- has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

But can you actually rely on it? I don't know. However when chasing a story, I have to dig as far back to the source as possible. The problem is, so many bloggers don't chase the source for validity. They pass it along to be picked up by tens-of-thousands of others who also don't have a clue if it's authentic.

More to come . . .

That's it for now. I have many more, and will keep the best ones in this column. At the risk of getting more comment spam, I'm leaving the commenting turned ON for this post -- and I invite (urge) you to chime in and share your insights on these issues.

thanks for reading

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